Langston Hughes, Foremost Poet of the Harlem Renaissance

LANGSTON HUGHES, FOREMOST POET OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

The poetry of protest and resistance arouses our critical attention because it represents a major type of world literature. This type of literature is often associated with liberation movements.

What is a “liberation movement”?

“A liberation movement is a type of social movement that seeks territorial independence or enhanced political or cultural autonomy (or rights of various types) within an existing nation-state for a particular national, ethnic, or racial group. The term has also been extended to or adopted by other types of groups (e.g., women and gays and lesbians) that seek to free themselves from various forms of domination and discrimination. National liberation movements have been an especially important force in the modern world…The division of the globe into nation-states, many of the wars among these states, and the hundreds of historical and contemporary conflicts among states and ethnic groups—in short, fundamental aspects of the modern world—cannot be understood without also understanding liberation movements.”

—“Liberation Movements,” Encyclopedia.com by Jeff Goodwin

See: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/liberation-movements#B

Although pro-democracy movements or armed left-wing insurgencies usually come to mind when we think of liberation movements, they also arise from the right wing, e.g. Islamist groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS, or the Taliban. Palestinian nationalism is a type of liberation movement.

Notably, authoritarian regimes and those incorporating varying degrees of authoritarianism characterize the majority of political systems today. Notwithstanding, political authoritarianism, rather than extinguishing liberation movements, incites them. They cannot be just switched off because they arise when oppressed groups resist social injustice, real or imagined, and seek structural redress.

The U.S. civil rights movement has been one of the most signal liberation movements in modern world history. Undertaken and led largely by African Americans—when we say “African Americans,” we mean the U.S. black population mainly—and directed against legally sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination in U.S. society—the U.S. civil rights movement was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, and possibly for this reason the movement was exceptionally successful in achieving its goals, at least in the political and legal aspects.

At least four major areas of the U.S. political and legal system were reformed: U.S. Supreme Court rulings striking down Jim Crow legislation; the passage of federal civil rights laws; 1964 ratification of the 24th amendment; and the formation of federal agencies tasked with civil rights agendas.

Despite the fact that racism still characterizes U.S. society today—it is an open scientific question whether social discrimination based on racial or ethnic group differences can be wholly eliminated—African Americans surely have come a long way from being regarded as chattel to electing one of their own to the presidency of a superpower.

Ideologically, the U.S. civil rights movement has directly influenced liberation movements worldwide, notably, nonviolent pro-democracy movements in the Philippines, Eastern Europe, China, Myanmar, “Arab Spring” countries, Ukraine, and Hong Kong (special administrative region of China), and feminist, gay rights, or indigenous people movements, which cut across individual nations. Not all pro-democracy movements have been successful.

At least 42 million blacks or about 14 percent of the U.S. population today are direct beneficiaries of the U.S. civil rights movement. This positive influence extends not only to the U.S. black population but also to other peoples of color in U.S. society.

Although it is difficult to quantify the global impact of the U.S. civil rights movement in terms of the total population affected, we can confidently say that its influence encompasses a broad swath of past and ongoing liberation movements, so that the total number readily adds up to the hundreds of millions.

The most important leader of the U.S. civil rights movement was Martin Luther King Jr. In this role he had a major influence on liberation movements arising since the sixties until the present time.

Between King and Langston Hughes, the former was my first choice for inclusion in my second list of ten greatest poets.

King?—a poet?

Look at major portions of his famous 1963 speech, “I Have a Dream,” and tell me it isn’t poetry:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

—“I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963 by Martin Luther King, Jr.

See: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

Eventually, I eliminated King from my list of candidates for ten greatest poets, numbers 11 to 20, because he was a civil rights activist first, a poet second. In contrast, Langston Hughes was a poet first, a political activist second.

Similarly, I eliminated Maya Angelou from my list of candidates because I see her as a political activist first, a poet second. Although I readily acknowledge Angelou’s popularity and influence, especially in the U.S., I do not find her poetry qua poetry, especially distinguished.

One reviewer, for example, has described her poetry as “Hallmark.” See “The Awfully Good Activism and Terribly Bad Poetry of Maya Angelou”:

—“The Awfully Good Activism and Terribly Bad Poetry of Maya Angelou,” Daily Review (August 15, 2016) by Helen Razer 

https://dailyreview.com.au/awfully-good-activism-terribly-bad-poetry-maya-angelou/47649/

Poetry magazine is far kinder, saying she would perform her poetry before spellbound crowds. The article celebrates her connection to “African-American oral traditions like slave and work songs, especially in her use of personal narrative and emphasis on individual responses to hardship, oppression, and loss,” adding that besides individual experience, she would “often respond to matters like race and sex on a larger social and psychological scale.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maya-angelou

Langston Hughes is in my second list of ten greatest poets because he was the foremost poet of the Harlem Renaissance, a direct precursor of the U.S. civil rights movement, which has been and continues to be enormously influential worldwide, especially among liberation movements that espouse nonviolence.

The Harlem Renaissance was not, strictly speaking, a liberation movement. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement, primarily literary in character, intended to cultivate, develop, and promote black culture and identity, among blacks themselves but also among whites. Some literature dealt with protest and resistance—after all, African Americans constitute an oppressed group in U.S. society—but this thread, which connects to later work, did not entirely define the movement. On the other hand, insofar as the Harlem Renaissance sought to construct black culture and identity in a manner that elevated blacks, repudiating denigrating historical portrayals and advancing beyond the grinding legacy of slavery and impoverishment, the movement may be interpreted as the robust aspect of a larger liberation struggle.

Why is Langston Hughes the foremost poet of the Harlem Renaissance? We suggest that he wrote some of the most poignant, memorable, and finely crafted poems of the movement, and as a result stood out from the rest. At one point he was described as the “poet laureate of black America.”

I have selected several of Hughes’ most famous poems for analysis and commentary. They are vibrant examples of his work.

HARLEM

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

This poem was originally published in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951).

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46548/harlem

Hughes wrote multiple poems about dreams—“Dreams,” “I Dream a World,” “As I Grew Older,” or “Let America Be America,” for example. Hughes’ “dream poems” allude to the “American Dream,” defined as follows:

“The ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American” and “A life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought by individuals in the U.S.”

The term “American Dream” was coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams (1878-1949) in “Epic of America”:

“…[as] that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

—“American Dream,” Dictionary.com

See: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/american-dream

“Harlem” invokes a series of metaphors that unmistakably convey in negative terms the denial to African Americans of the American Dream. Their disenfranchisement is a “festering sore,” “rotten meat,” or “heavy load.”

Also popularly known as “Dream Deferred,” “Harlem” has been described as prophetic. “Dream deferred,” Hughes says in the poem, will at some point “explode,” which is exactly what happened several years after the poem was published, when during the U.S. civil rights movement African Americans successfully fought against Jim Crow.

Critics connect the content of Martin Luther King’s writings directly to Langston Hughes, especially “I Have a Dream,” King’s August 28, 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” published on April 16 the same year.

See, for example:

—“How Langston Hughes’s Dreams Inspired MLK’s,” Smithsonian.com (February 1, 2017) by Kat Eschner

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-langston-hughess-dreams-inspired-mlks-180961929/

—“Langston Hughes’ hidden influence on MLK,” The Conversation (March 30, 2018) by Jason Miller

http://theconversation.com/langston-hughes-hidden-influence-on-mlk-91736

King did not acknowledge this literary debt because he was careful to distance himself from Hughes who had in the past flirted with communism. Well aware that opponents of the U.S. civil rights movement would seek to undermine it—and they did so with some success—with blown-up charges of communist sympathy and affiliation, King made a decision that was based on intelligent politics.

Was Hughes a Communist? Depends on how you want to answer this question. Two possible answers: “No” and “Nearly so.”

“No”—Hughes was never a member of the Communist party, he did not explicitly profess Communist ideology, and he never identified himself as a Communist.

“Nearly so”—Hughes was sympathetic toward Communism in the thirties, a period of major ideological flux and political upheaval in the U.S. and Europe. His political leanings should not surprise us because Communist ideology champions the struggle of the economically oppressed, which includes the racially oppressed blacks. Hughes’ poems were frequently published in the newspaper of the Communist Party of the U.S., and in 1938 he signed a statement supporting Stalin's purges. He supported causes pushed by Communist organizations, such as the drive to free the Scottsboro Boys and the side of the Spanish Republic, and he showed sympathy for Communist-led organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In the fifties, however, he began to distance himself from his left-leaning past. His Selected Poems published in 1959, for example, omitted his radical poetry.

“I, Too,” like “Harlem,” protests the social oppression of blacks in the U.S. However, it does not make the same point so directly.

I, TOO

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

This poem was originally published in The Weary Blues (1926).

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47558/i-too

The vignette cuts to the chase—consigned to eat in the kitchen, the speaker laughs, eats well, and grows strong. No bitterness here, we sense, but rather self-assurance. He knows the indignity is temporary.

Seeing the future, he foretells that it is his oppressors who will be shamed, not him. He, the darker brother—they will see how beautiful he is.

Chiding, the protest is powerfully understated.

The opening and closing lines, symmetrical, allude to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” sealing the poem, unifying it.

This last poem, “Po’ Boy Blues” is written in a variety of the slave dialect that over generations has changed and varied. 

PO’ BOY BLUES

When I was home de

Sunshine seemed like gold.

When I was home de

Sunshine seemed like gold.

Since I come up North de

Whole damn world’s turned cold.

I was a good boy,

Never done no wrong.

Yes, I was a good boy,

Never done no wrong,

But this world is weary

An’ de road is hard an’ long.

I fell in love with

A gal I thought was kind.

Fell in love with

A gal I thought was kind.

She made me lose ma money

An’ almost lose ma mind.

Weary, weary,

Weary early in de morn.

Weary, weary,

Early, early in de morn.

I’s so weary

I wish I’d never been born.

This poem was originally published in The Weary Blues (1926).

See: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/po-boy-blues

Some in the Harlem Renaissance opposed this type of literature because, they said, it depicts African Americans in a demeaning light—poor, uneducated, repellent, in some instances involved in immorality or crime. Critical of Hughes’ poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Estace Gay, for example, argued “our aim ought to be [to] present to the general public, already misinformed both by well meaning and malicious writers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves.”

Not all critics were so urbane. The Chicago Whip, for instance, according to Hughes, characterized him as “the poet low-rate of Harlem.”

See:

—“Langston Hughes: The People’s Poet,” National Museum of African American History & Culture (February 1, 2018) by Angelica Aboulhosn

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/langston-hughes-peoples-poet

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughes

Hughes responded graciously to his detractors.

“I sympathized deeply with those critics and those intellectuals, and I saw clearly the need for some of the kinds of books they wanted. But I did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, I personally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good. Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability to work up to a master's degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/langston-hughes

Today, Hughes’ poems flourish because, precisely, they were written in dialect, or at least, a dialect form adapted to Standard English. His social realism meaningfully engages contemporary readers. History has proven his approach correct.

“Po’ Boy Blues” is compelling not only for the realism of the dialect but also because it portrays the hard luck circumstances of the speaker, which authentically recapitulate the condition at the time of the migrant black underclass.

The poem draws the reader into the touching perspective of the black migrant from the South, enters into his predicament steeped in pathos, and concludes with his lament, deeply evocative. 

Langston Hughes, 1942